Embracing the polarity: engaged detachment
I am noticing some weariness coming up around what I am exploring in my daily life, writing about here, and also reading in books and blogs. There is a mix of it seeming so obvious, and yet not very clear (!)
I can just watch it, shift the center of gravity out of it, not be caught up in it, not fuel it, not push it away, just allowing it to be. Shifting into the seeing of it. Shifting out of form and into the emptiness and wakeful formless. Alone, that feels a little barren.
I can feel into it, allowing it to unfold and deepen within the felt richness of it. This is form engaging with form.
And then there is the embrace of both: feeling into it, deeply, richly, within the context of an absence of I (or even just the sense of it.)
And as there is a more full awakening of realized selflessness, form is (still) of course fully free to engage with itself as much as it want. There can be a full engagement with whatever comes up, a full engagement and exploration in terms of bringing attention to, feeling into, and following the unfolding of whatever comes up, and in terms of engaging in the world, in relationships, in politics, in discussions, in whatever comes up to be engaged in. And the engagement is maybe even fuller than when there is still a sense of I, since this tends to create a good deal of ambivalence. In the context of realized selflessness, there is an invitation for a more whole hearted participation.
Yet, in a different way, the degree of engagement is exactly the same before and after awakening to realized selflessness. The human self is living its own life before and after, an inherent part of the world of form, not able to extract itself from being influenced by infinite causes and itself being the cause of infinite effects. It is as fully engaged in the world of form as a water molecule is fully engaged in the ocean it is a part of. Any sense of fuller or less full engagement is at a different, more conventional, level.
Labels: absent of I, transcend and include